10 years of making local businesses impossible to ignore

Our story

Adency was founded in 2016 in Richmond, Virginia, at a moment when local businesses were losing the internet to national chains with bigger budgets. We believed — and still believe — that a great local business with a smart search strategy beats a big brand with a generic one.

Since then we've grown into a full-service digital marketing agency serving the entire DMV: Richmond and its suburbs, Washington DC, the Northern Virginia tech corridor, and Maryland's commercial centers. The toolkit has expanded — SEO, PPC, web design, content, email, and now AI search optimization — but the job has never changed: make sure that when your customer searches, you're the answer.

Meet the founder

Nikolai Hanov founded Adency in 2016 and still leads every strategy the agency ships. He has spent 10+ years doing this work hands-on — through the mobile-first migration, the rise and fall of a dozen "guaranteed ranking" fads, every major Google core update, and now the shift to AI-driven search. If there's a tactic in this industry, odds are Nikolai has tested it on a real campaign and kept only what survived contact with the data.

That test-everything history is the reason Adency's playbook looks the way it does: no recycled templates, no tactics held over from 2019 because they're comfortable, and an early move into AI search optimization before most agencies in the DMV had a name for it. Nikolai personally reviews every client audit — when you book a consultation, the analysis you get reflects a decade of knowing which problems actually move revenue and which ones just look impressive in a report.

What we believe